


let's pretend to fall asleep now

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [15]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Feels, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exhaustion, Flashbacks, Hallucinations, Holding Hands, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, Sharing a Bed, Sleep Deprivation, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Survivor Guilt, Touch-Starved, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27281446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: "I'm right here," Bucky whispered, warm and familiar, grounding Steve like an anchor that he could keep coming back to whenever he drifted too far away. Though they were so far from who they had been from Before, the familiarity of who they were together was undeniable – two souls building themselves back together like glass mosaics of a singular masterpiece, and that was enough. It was everything.Or Steve and Bucky hold hands in their sleep.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 8
Kudos: 71
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	let's pretend to fall asleep now

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this at 1am, listening to low-fi. seemed appropriate.
> 
> inspired by a headcanon post i saw where steve has to fall asleep holding bucky's hand ever since the train.
> 
> whumptober prompt day 23: what's a whumpee gotta do to get some sleep around here?, exhaustion, sleep deprivation
> 
> title from 'are you bored yet?' - wallows

Bucky's eyes were flowers, flowers of ice and snow. They were fields of ruby roses painted on empty canvases with scarlet blood upon graves of hail above the frosted earth. 

God, it was cold. Cold like the snowflakes that fallen from the pastel blue hue of the Northern sky, and as frostbitten as his empty, bloodless hands had felt when he reached towards his lover, only for Bucky to collapse into smithereens like the mutilated metal of the train – like the snowflakes that rained from the ungodly heavens above.

Because then he fell. 

He fell, and the almost perfect picture-like memory was so cystralised into Steve's brain that he could touch it, yet it never became tangible enough for him to grip Bucky's freezing flesh with his own.

The sound of his screams were ringing within his head like a faded snowstorm once Steve realised where he was, _when_ he was – enough for him to remember that _what once was_ could have been _eons_ ago – but the cold remained within his bones like a cariogenic disease, plaguing him raw as the absence of Bucky devoured him alive.

Steve shouldn't have had the instinct to reach for his shield in the corner when Bucky's own very real, undeniably grounding voice pierced through the veil of his long-dead scream that played like sadistic music inside Steve's head at 4AM, but he did, if only for a fleeting moment.

Bucky had turned slightly to face him, their bodies mirroring each other in the dark. The moonlight glowed through the curtained window, illuminating the room enough for Steve to see the pale light reflect against Bucky's eyes the way the snow had.

"Steve?" He murmured, eyes wide and slow-blinking, peering into his own as if trying to undo Steve's seams that held everything so arcanely hidden. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Bad dream." Steve whispered with an unsteady breath. He hadn't remembered ever falling asleep – not for the last couple of weeks – and the thought that reality was blurry with his own sleep-deprived hallucinations was far more frightening than any nightmare. "Did I wake you?"

"No." His voice was too clear, too steady even though the words weren't louder than a breath. Steve knew that Bucky hadn't been asleep either. They were good at make-believe within the dark – matching steady breaths, too-still bodies that lay like porcelain dolls in cold sheets, pretending to fall asleep. Maybe that was easier than falling in different, more colder, solidifying ways.

"Sorry," Steve said anyway, because falling asleep shouldn't have to be difficult, and yet here they were. Shards of abstract memories returned to Steve within smells of rosewood candles, cigarette smoke and charcoal pencils – city nights where they'd slept on single mattresses or couch cushions, staying there within the dreamless oblivion for hours until morning came. 

Now, the night smelled of intangible snow, titanium and blood. Sleep was something of a blessing they didn't deserve after all they had done, all that they'd become, he supposed.

"You're shaking." Bucky pointed out softly, in that obnoxiously woeful way he did whenever Steve hadn't even noticed himself. The tone hadn't changed since they were children.

_You know you're bleeding, right?_

_Steve, sit down for a second. You're going to collapse._

_Hey, breathe with me._

"What were you thinking about?" He asked softly, running the backs of his fingers delicately against Steve's cheek with his flesh, human hand. Steve's cold skin was icy against Bucky's, but neither seemed to mind. The touch was that of a million tiny embers slowly drowning away the snow, and suddenly Steve didn't ever want him to let go.

"The train," Steve whispered in a soundless breath, afraid if he broke the blissful night's calmness of false oblivion with such a word – a memory – so very ugly, that the dazed moonlight would glow red, that Bucky's face – staring at him with doll-like eyes and an undeserving patient expression – would become cystralised in ice, bloodless with frozen frostbite eating away at his flesh.

Bucky's glazed-over eyes, glassy and smothered by exhaustion, stilled once they reached Steve's. 

"The train," he echoed softly, voice absent of remorse or anger like Steve would've thought – like how it _should_ have sounded. 

But it wasn't. Bucky was calm and soft and grounding, and that made Steve's heart ache – to know that Bucky was the one who fell, who lost himself and everything at all, and yet Steve was the one who needed rapture, who needed to be saved.

The image of Bucky falling out of the sky towards the snow, hand never meeting Steve's was pounding instead his head in the unnerved quietness of their bedroom, and the silence was beginning to come undone the way their outstretched arms had long, long ago. Steve wondered, painfully – suffocatingly – if the hand Bucky had tried to grasp Steve with was the same one that had rotted and died and froze in the snow. He couldn't remember if it was, and the thought was making bile rise from his throat.

He wondered if he should have fallen from the train, too. If he'd spent eternity in a different, more vile kind of ice, he would have spared Bucky from the things he should have protected him from. 

It was like an endless merry-go-round, looped until the end of infinity, that spun around his mind, constricting his conscience into fragmented prices from an abstract evil that never seized to exist ever since the freight car and its rain of snow and something so very human.

"I lost you again and again and again, and I – I _can't…_ " Steve started to choke, words falling desperately from his lips as the hand against his cheek was this overwhelming force he couldn't ever let go of for as long as they both existed. Until the end of the line was reached, and they'd finally rest together forever. But until then, he needed Bucky like he needed air. 

"But you always found me," Bucky said, voice so calm and familiar in all the ways Steve didn't deserve – in all the ways that made Steve selfishly crave more and more of Bucky Barnes until that dangerous, desperate type of love consumed him. Maybe Bucky, staring at him through those same hungry, longing eyes understood exactly, all the same. 

He dropped his hand from Steve's face only to find where Steve's lay underneath the cold sheets. He brought their entangled hands together between their faces, running his thumb along Steve's shaking, cold flesh palm and soothing it still. 

"I'm right here," Bucky whispered, warm and familiar and grounding Steve like an anchor that he could keep coming back to whenever he drifted too far away inside his own exhausted delirium, or otherwise. Though they were so far from who they had been from _Before_ , the familiarity of who they were _together_ was undeniable – two souls building themselves back together like glass mosaics into a singular masterpiece, and that was enough. It was everything. 

"You found me." Bucky pressed his lips to the back of Steve's hand, littering his calming, warming flesh with little kisses from the heat from his mouth. "You can't lose me if our hands don't let go."

"I can't lose you anymore ever." He said, voice as desperate as it had been before – a plead, a prayer.

"You won't have to. You're stuck with me until the end, remember? You think I _won't_ hold your hand for the rest of eternity, Rogers?" 

"You _should_."

"I'm making up for the times I didn't," Bucky said softly into the small space between their bodies where their entangled hands lay as a connected lifeline, a symbol of infinity. 

Instead of snow and ice and something so very human falling from the sky, Steve's eyes focused on the man in front of him, his own pastel irises illuminated like stardust within the darkness. He watched Bucky until he couldn't, drifting off to a place that smelled like charcoal pencils and felt like lying upon couch cushions upon the floor.

And this time when Steve reached out for Bucky's hand, Bucky took it.


End file.
